User equipment (UE) that supports low cost machine type communication (LC-MTC) is a special type of UE, has lower costs as compared with an ordinary UE, and has features including: (1) a single radio-frequency receive chain; (2) an uplink/downlink transport block is less than 1000 bits; and (3) only baseband data in a 1.4 M bandwidth can be received.
A process that a UE accesses a network in the prior art is: The UE receives a physical broadcast channel (PBCH) and a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) from a base station, and separately acquires a master information block (MIB) from the PBCH, and acquires a system information block (SIB) from the PDSCH; next, the UE initiates a random access process based on the MIB and the SIB, and after access succeeds, the UE performs subsequent signaling transmission and data transmission.
In the prior art, a UE in an idle state performs cell reselection when quality of service of a current cell of the UE is lower than a particular threshold, and when a service needs to be received or sent, the UE establishes a connection to a network, and then receives or sends data.
In the prior art, when a UE in a connected state performs measurement according to a measurement configuration on a network side, and reports a measurement result to a network side device, and when the network side device determines, based on the measurement result, that a handover condition is met, the network side device instructs the UE to be handed over to another cell.
There may be a cell that does not support LC-MTC (for example, a cell a cell belonging to an existing base station that is not upgraded) in a network, and therefore: 1. According to an existing random access process, a UE that supports LC-MTC may be selected to such a cell, and then attempts to perform data exchange with a network side according to the foregoing procedure, and in a process of the data exchange, if a scheduled PDSCH transmission resource exceeds 1.4 M, or an uplink/downlink transport block is greater than 1000 bits, a problem of a capability mismatch with the UE may occur. 2. According to an existing cell reselection process, if a UE that supports LC-MTC is reselected to a cell that does not support LC-MTC, and in a process of establishing a connection or receiving or sending data, if a scheduled PDSCH transmission resource exceeds 1.4 M, or an uplink/downlink transport block is greater than 1000 bits, a problem of a capability mismatch with the UE may also occur. 3. According to an existing cell handover process, if a UE that supports LC-MTC handed over to a cell that does not support LC-MTC, and if it occurs that a scheduled PDSCH transmission resource exceeds 1.4 M, or an uplink/downlink transport block greater than 1000 bits, a problem of a capability mismatch with the UE may also occur. The foregoing three cases result in a waste of authorized resources and extra power consumption of the UE or an interruption of data transmission.
Therefore, how to better match capability of a UE with a cell is a problem that needs to be resolved.